Prowler

It used to be important to me that people understood that I was a dog person. Not like a half-human-half-canid sort of chimerical obscenity before god, just that if I was going to have a pet or be excited about interacting with your pet, I would prefer it to be a dog. This is still largely true as I find the insistent, food-motivated, relentlessly needy energy of dogs a Proustian callback to the environment I was raised in. Give that dog 11 beers before lunchtime and I'm right back to third grade, standing on that corner outside of the school, waiting for the ride home that was never coming. Again. Ha ha, all nostalgia is good...

We only really ever had dogs when I was a kid. But we moved a million times, so we'd have them for a while and then... honestly I'm not always sure what then, especially when I was younger. They were there for a while and then... weren't. I would definitely associate dogs with specific places more than I would as an immutable part of my family on par with, like, my sisters or something. I learned later in life that my mother never really held on to pets long enough to have to deal with The Dark Inevitability that all pets present upon the point of purchase. Having experienced it myself with the last dog I owned, I understand the aversion I suppose. There's a reason I haven't had another one in the decade since. It's the only thing I can think of you decide to be responsible for to the point of death, except I guess your children but in that case the expected death is your own. So the vibe is slightly different.

My younger sister had a cat I think, maybe two, at different points of our later adolescence. The fact that I can't remember when or how long or even what they looked like should help us establish a mind-picture of the level of my interaction, interest and relationship with the things. I'd like to say I wasn't one of those teenaged boys who went around saying cats were bad pets, but it wouldn't be true. It was a very weird cultural artifact of the 1980s and 1990s, associating cat ownership somehow with femininity, the kryptonite of fragile boy-identified hetero people in the midst of their sexual and social awakenings. These days of course YouTube and Instagram are lousy with video and photos of the butchiest butch boys and their slinky cat pals doin' cat pal stuff. Like antidepressants and drinking hot tea and gay marriage, we do evolve out of some stigma over time.

That's all behind me now as I'm a middle-aged adult man with adult man children, one of whom lives at my house still. As of yesterday, that last one he bought himself a cat. By the transitive property of cohabitation, that guy's cat is now also sort of my cat. The arrangement before the cat arrived is that we agreed I wouldn't be responsible for any of its food, feeding, effluvia or general maintenance. It's only been one night, but so far so good. My man-offspring, though, he's working on about three hours of sleep since the cat spent its first night here doing anxious cat things like vocalizing at shadows and pouncing on literally everything, including his almost-sleeping form at every most-inopportune opportunity. I'm certain he'll figure it out and they'll come to an equilibrium of some kind. In the meantime, I can interact with it when it suits me and then issue a curt but polite "fuck off" when it doesn't. I'm going to make an outstanding grandpa.